Monday, November 7, 2016

Pizzicato (finale)

“Flat! Flat! You’re flat!” my father cried, swooping into my
bedroom and waving his arms. He wasn’t scolding me—he just couldn’t bear it
when I played out of tune. Occasionally, these interruptions would turn into a
full lesson. More often, after reminding me to hold up my violin, my father would
dash off to a rehearsal, a performance, or some other student’s regularly-scheduled
lesson.

I was twelve and more advanced
now, playing “real” music—Handel, Vivaldi, Viotti—and practicing an hour a day.
But as I progressed, my ability to criticize my own playing had also advanced,
and I was more aware than ever of the gulf that separated my playing from my
father’s.

As conscious as I was of my
failings, I had little notion of how to remedy them, and every hour I spent
cloistered in my room with my four-stringed enemy felt like a week. Worst of
all, my hoped-for reward—an hour of my father’s attention and possible approval—only
came at long and unpredictable intervals. Given all this, I failed to see why I
should be made to practice at all.

This is where my mother came
in. My father having neither the temperament nor the leisure to keep me on
task, she became the enforcer. “Have you practiced yet today?” she would ask as
I finished my homework.

I would roll my eyes and
close the door to my room. I would open the case, inhaling the sad, sour smell
that emanated from its maroon velvet lining; pick up the violin; tuck it under
my chin, and tighten the bow hairs. Then I would begin my musical Stations of
the Cross—first the scales, then the harder position and bowing exercises, uphill
through the assigned pages of Kreutzer, finally ending on the Golgotha of some sonata. When the hour was
over I would emerge shouting “I hate the violin! It’s awful! I despise it!”

My mother would shake her
head sadly. “Such a pity! Such a
pity! Daddy tells me all the time what a fine violinist you could be if only you wanted to. He says you have
a good tone—something that can’t be taught….”

I wondered why my father
never said those things to me, never looked me in the eye and said I had a good
tone. As it was, my mother’s words only irritated me. “I don’t care,” I would
say, stamping my foot. “It’s hateful. Why should I spend all this time on
something I hate?”

My mother would smile
wistfully. “Some day, when you are grown up and married, and living in your own
house, on a rainy afternoon when you are feeling melancholy you will pick up
your violin and play, and be grateful that I made you practice.”

This explanation only added
fuel to my anger. I didn’t want to
grow up into a lady with no way to fill a rainy afternoon. I had seen what empty
afternoons did to my mother! Despite my dislike of it, to me the violin was serious
business, not some bored housewife’s occasional pastime. I knew only too well
how terrible that housewife would sound, if she only practiced when she was in
certain moods.

Underlying all this was my
intuition that there was something amiss in the lives of my mother and the
other women in my family. They were charming, attractive, educated and smart.
They were good at many things: they embroidered, painted in oils, played
various instruments. They read constantly, went to concerts and to art exhibits
every week. But somehow, in a way I couldn’t understand but was sure of, they
weren’t serious. My father, on the
other hand, was.

On the brink of puberty,
without ever having been told so expressly, I saw myself relegated by fate to
the charming, witty, non-serious side of things. Unfortunately, I wanted both:
to be clever and attractive (especially that, please God) as well as serious. As for the violin, if I couldn’t play like my
father, then I wanted no part of it.

Years passed. My mother stuck to her guns and I to my
grousing. In my freshman year in college, my father decided that I needed some orchestra
experience. The woman who played in the last stand of the second violins in the
Birmingham Symphony was going on maternity leave and had to be replaced. My
father drove me to the conductor’s house one afternoon. I auditioned, and was told
to report for rehearsal that same evening.

The nightly rehearsals and
weekend concerts wreaked havoc with my social life, not to mention my study
hours. I was so terrified of playing an unintended “solo” that I spent my time
in the orchestra mostly trying not to be heard. But in some ways these were
good music times for me: my father was the violin instructor at the college I
attended, and I signed up for classes from him. On Friday afternoons, when it
was time for my lesson, he would suggest that we go back home and do the lesson
there. But I, knowing what would inevitably happen once we arrived—the phone
would ring, my mother would have to be driven somewhere, somebody would drop
by—insisted on having my lesson on campus, in a real classroom, like a regular
student.

He must have liked what he
heard during those lessons, because one day he announced that he and I were
going to play the Bach Double Violin Concerto at the college’s weekly assembly.
(In those by-gone days, it was usual for the undergraduate student body to
convene for cultural events.)

Both flattered and terrified,
I practiced hard. He and I rehearsed together a few times, and I got some
pointers on ensemble playing (don’t play loud all the time; listen to the other
voice). The day came. I did my best and even enjoyed it, in a strange way. The audience
clapped and clapped--the Bach Double is an easy work to like—and one former
boyfriend confessed that he had wept during the slow movement. I was pleased,
and yet…

I was living at home,
cleaning the house, doing the ironing, babysitting my sister, and giving
private language lessons. I was taking a full academic load, majoring in
Biology and French. I got only one credit for my violin courses, but worked
harder on that than on all the rest.

Compared to the violin, the
rest of college—the life cycle of the blood fluke, the dissected dogshark, even
the poetry of Mallarmé--seemed relatively straightforward. I longed to sit
with my classmates drinking coffee in the snack bar in the afternoons,
listening to Frank Sinatra and smoking an occasional cigarette. I longed to
walk the leaf-strewn campus paths with a boy at my side, like a regular American
college student. The violin had to go.

All this was half a century ago.
I am now a married lady, in my own house. And on a rainy afternoon, or even a
sunny one, whether I am feeling melancholy or otherwise, I open my case and
take out my plastic Yamaha alto recorder. I start with some basic
tonalizations, remembering to hold my instrument up and minding my breath (which
is the hairless equivalent of the bow). I struggle through some challenging bits
by “Unknown 18th Century Masters” and cap things off with Georg
PhilippTelemann, a composer who devoted himself to tormenting recorder players.

Before I know it, an hour has
passed. I look forward to my lessons, and to playing duets and trios with
friends. These days, nobody has to remind me to practice. As I swab the spit out
of the instrument and put it away, I can hear faint laughter emanating from the
woods behind the house, where my mother’s ashes are scattered.